around the fireplace

 Eleven months ago, I wrote ‘Thoughts…’ in response to a question asked by a friend: ‘Do you call yourself a Hindu?’

After much introspection, I had answered that question: ‘Yes, I do call myself a Hindu, when I do call myself anything.’

Today, my answer is different. I do not, will not identify myself with any religious label, not for any purpose. I do not base my identity on any religious beliefs or upbringing, nor do I wish to take on and live under a label. My religious beliefs are, at best, amorphous. I am interested in the dynamics, practices and mythologies of belief systems, and in observing their effect on people. But I do not believe as others do in a God, a Divine presence, in prayer, in puja, in rites and in rituals.

Religions, or belief-systems as I would prefer to refer to them, are rich in human experience, human wisdom. They are also rich in symbols. Understanding these symbols is important for a true understanding of any belief-system. Sadly, more and more of us are unable or unwilling to do so, and are taking literally much that is metaphor for a greater truth.

Religion divides and separates. He is Hindu, she is Muslim, that belief is Sikh, this is Jewish. Why do we let this happen? Why have we lost sight of the human spirit that runs through all cultures, all societies, everywhere on this earth? From the penthouses of New York and Mumbai to the forest dwellings of the tribes of eastern India, human beings are moved by the same passions. They love, they hate, they weep, they laugh. They have dreams and aspirations. They have their daily struggles. The details, of course, differ, but the fundamental emotions, needs and drives are the same all over the planet.

I am moved equally by the story of Jesus, the story of Karna, and by Shakespeare’s King Lear. Mortal men, all of them, great in their time, their lives ending in tragedy. I don’t know if Karna ever existed, or if a Lear ever walked this earth. All three stories are metaphors for aspects of  human existence, aspects that all of us experience in part or in whole, in some degree or manner, during our own lives. Yes, we need such stories to live by. Each culture, each group of people even, has its heroes. But why must we make gods of them, and then go to war in their name? It makes no sense to me.

Sometimes what is called religion is often only a matter of birth, and of familiarity. I am more comfortable with the Hindu and Jain rituals that attend birth, marriage and death. I know I would prefer to be cremated, not buried, when I die. Ideally, I should be able to rise above such considerations. Maybe I won’t be able to. Yet that will not make me a Hindu or a Jain, not unless I am willing to let myself be so labelled. Which I am not.

All around me I see the selective use of Vedic, Brahmanical, Hindu thought and philosophy to condone and encourage exploitation and discrimination. In recent months, I have met people who have succeeded in turning that most gentle of faiths, Jainism, into a vehicle of anger and intolerance.

The terror attack on Mumbai, again in the name of God - that leaves me shaking with grief. Right now I don’t have the distance to be objective or the words to describe what I feel. Only one thought comes to mind, again and again - what kind of people are these, to have given themselves a faith and a god that lets them do such things? How low has mankind fallen? Perhaps the stories that tell of  fallen angels - those stories were prophetic. We couldn’t read the metaphors. We still can’t.

I don’t quite know what to write, what to say. The events in Mumbai have left me bereft of words. Mumbai is a city I love, where I have spent some of the happiest years of my life, some of its most fulfilling moments. The Taj. Hey! We used to hang out there! Remember the time we giggled over coffee together? Remember the bookshop? And the number of times we have taken a detour through the Taj lobby on our way to somewhere else…

These are the memories I hide behind, as I try to understand what this latest attack means for the city, for my country, for the world.

I was in Mumbai in 1992, when the Babri Masjid riots broke out, and in 1993, when thirteen bomb blasts ravaged the city. I have seen the city in flames, the army flag-march through deserted, riot-torn streets. But this attack, somehow, is different.

Should Mumbaikars just pick themselves up again and carry on with life as though nothing has happened? They’ve done that, we’ve done that so many times in the past. How many more times will that be required of us?

Are we a country at war? And if we are, then, as a friend asked - what rules of engagement are these? With a hidden, unacknowledged enemy? I don’t have answers to these questions.

Last night was a long night. A friend was trapped inside the Taj. As I sat, glued to the TV, worrying about Mumbai, worrying about him, I couldn’t quite believe it was happening. Later, when he was out, and away and safe, it began to hit me, slowly and very hard. ‘There was so much blood, Ro, on the floors…’ he said.

The battle continues. More than a hundred dead. Fourteen policemen killed. As I write, there are people still inside the Taj, the Trident, Nariman House…

This morning I wanted to gather all my beloved people in a room and keep them safe inside. Now, a few hours later, that wish seems selfish and small. Now I only wish to tell them how much I love them, and hope that they will find the courage, strength and fortitude to face whatever life brings. We need strength of mind and spirit to get through this, as people, as a nation.

Memory, how it works, and  why it works the way it does, is a mystery that no one has solved yet. Why do we remember some people and not others? How is it that we can recall some events with complete clarity and some events not at all? Colours, textures, even the smells of certain moments stay with us forever -  consciously, so that we can recall them at will, or subconsciously, so that a sudden trigger brings flooding into our minds, people, places and events we thought we had forgotten.

This morning, as I pottered around the house, fixing breakfast for the children, hanging out the washing, making a cup of tea for myself, I thought, suddenly and for no apparent reason at all, of the old guava-seller who used to be a regular feature of my winter holidays.

The old man would turn up on our doorstep, a basket of green and yellow guavas balanced on his head. To my seven-year-old eyes, he looked really really old, though perhaps he wasn’t much older than sixty at the time. He would be dressed in a dusty, white dhoti and kurta; he had wispy grey hair and untidy whiskers, and wore a pair of round spectacles with lenses so thick that they seemed opaque. He would cut the fruit into quarters, and sprinkle it with a black masala that gave off a sharp, pungent, but oh! such a delicious smell. If it turned out that the guava was a deep pink inside, and sweet, I would be delighted - for that was my favourite kind of guava. If the guava turned out to be ordinary, boring white inside, then my mother would admonish him, and insist that next time, he must bring the pink ones.

Steam-of-consciousness style, this memory triggered off thoughts and more memories of the other, itinerant pedlars who would come to our door or call their wares on the streets of my childhood. There was the potter, balancing an amazing number of earthern pots on his head, pots that would keep our drinking water cool in the hot summer months and flavour it with the taste and smell of clay. There was the knife-grinder, who would carry off all the kitchen knives to be sharpened, and return them an hour later, their edges gleaming. And the balloonwala, with his bright yellow, pink, blue and orange balloons bobbing along behind him. He would call to the children, Pied-Piper fashion, by blowing on a shrill, squeaky whistle, and when enough of us had gathered round, delight us with the strange four-legged beasts he fashioned out of thin, tube-like balloons that he bent and twisted as he pleased without them popping.

But my favourite was the kalaiwala, the man who came to ‘galvanise’ the kitchen pots and karahis. With a puff of his bellows and a sizzle and a hiss, he would turn the old, beaten, copper vessels, into shining silver ones. It was the closest thing to alchemy that I have seen.

Though I no longer see the kalaiwala, or hear the whirring of the knifegrinder’s wheel that often, I know that should I need them, I will still be able to find them, in a corner of some busy market, or down a narrow lane or gully in the older parts of India’s megacities where the past continues to exist quite regardless of the present.

Some vendors and their trades continue to flourish even into the modern way of life. The vegetable-vendor, the flower-seller, the milkman, the bread-wala, and the green coconut-seller continued to be regular visitors to my flat in Mumbai many years later. With a small child and a household to run, I was deeply grateful for the service and convenience these vendors provided.

When I moved to London, I moved fully prepared to face a life quite empty of such luxuries. ‘You’ll miss this service in London,’ friends had warned. ‘Nobody brings anything to your front door there.’

They were wrong - I get fresh milk delivered to my doorstep every day, and groceries as often as I like.

And, along with the convenient, I also get the exotic - the knifegrinder (yes, here too!) who asks ‘Need anything sharpened, luv?’; the fishmonger who offers me fresh fish and goes away shaking his head at my incomprehensible, vegetarian ways; and strangest of all, a few weeks ago, a smartly-dressed, middle-aged woman selling - manure!

Yes, manure. For my garden. At £2.50 a bag, knocked down from £6.50, an offer I should not refuse. When I do refuse, she points out that it will help to break up the clay in my garden, and ‘besides, all your neighbours ‘ave bought some.’ When I still hesitate, she hands me her business card. ‘A’right then,’ she says, ‘that’s me number there. Ring me if yer change yer mind. Anyway, I’ll be back in the autumn.’

Of course, such exotic visitors are few and far between.

Street vendors and itinerant pedlars had once livened the streets of London much as they had enlivened the streets of my childhood. They disappeared with the coming of the twentieth century.

Fortunately, in London too, the past continues to exist into the present - though in a different format. If one searches for them, the street vendors of London can still be found preserved in miniature books that consist of pictures of the various street-sellers with their cries printed beneath, and a verse describing them. The criers call out such wares as muffins, hot chestnuts, fresh herrings, eels, strawberries, cherries, primroses, matches, and newly-printed ballads. There are also pictures of knifegrinders, milkmaids, and chimney sweeps with their boys.

These books came to be known as the Cries of London. Most of these books were published between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, and many of them were for children.

London Cries are also mentioned in the fifteenth century poem, ‘London Lickpenny’(written perhaps by John Lydgate):

London, where I live, and Mumbai,  where I used to live. Two fascinating cities that seem very different, but, surprisingly, are more alike than not.

Even today, after years of familiarity with Mumbai, I look forward to every visit there with a tingle of excitement and expectation. As my plane circles in the sky waiting for a landing space at the crowded Santa Cruz airport, Mumbai appears below me, spread out like a map in 3D. The Arabian Sea, grey and calm, laps gently against the city’s southern edge outlining it in silver and rust. The skyscrapers rise high into the sky from streets so very familiar to me. It’s not dawn yet, and the streets must still be relatively empty: from this high up in the air I cannot tell. In my mind’s eye I imagine the traffic building up, and see the whirling, twirling, colourful, noisy, smelly mass of humanity that makes up the city. My plane is given clearance to land, and as it comes in, the slums and shanty towns of Santa Cruz rush up to meet me, their tin roofs patched with blue plastic, and glinting in the rising sun.

I pick up my baggage and hurry out of the busy, crowded terminal. Noise engulfs me, so I cannot hear myself think: unintelligible announcements over the public address system, shrieking, blaring traffic, and running through and over it, the loud, impassioned chatter of my countrymen. I am glad to see the  familiar face of the friend who has come to receive me. She takes charge, and steers me firmly through the chaos. I climb gratefully into the relatively quiet haven of her car. ‘What a noisy bunch of people we Indians are!’ I think.

London, even at its noisiest, cannot hope to compete with the deafening clamour of Mumbai. London is contained, quiet and polite. The traffic, though heavy, is mostly silent: a sounding horn is something that turns heads. People speak in quiet voices, and loud conversations are met with disapproving glances and uncomfortable shufflings by those around you. Even dogs don’t seem to bark here, or when they do, they are shushed quickly and firmly.

London, despite its sprawl and size, usually does not give the impression of being a  big city,  made up as it is of many self-contained little towns, some larger than others, all stitched together in an orderly patchwork of terraced houses, narrow streets, green back gardens and paved patios.

Despite these apparent differences, both London and Mumbai are mega-cities, with a heterogeneous, culturally-mixed population and a rich and vibrant intellectual and cultural life; both are centres of business and finance, London doing at a global level what Mumbai does at the India level; and both offer its citizens anonymity, affluence, convenience, comfort,  and the freedom to live life in the manner they wish to.

There are other similarities too:

Each city has its own distinctive ‘language’, Cockney, the working-class speech of East London, and the ‘Mumbaiyya Hindi’ of Mumbai, dialects that are vigorous, vibrant, irreverent - and defining.

Both cities are often written off as ‘unfriendly’ by first-time visitors, who vilify  Londoners and Mumbaikars alike for their hurrying pace and lack of smiles, though both groups are essentially friendly, helpful people - if only they had the time!

Both cities have great wealth, and poverty too. In Mumbai, the homeless carpet the pavements at night; in London, the poor are less abjectly poor, but there are still too many of them - under the tunnels of Waterloo Station, in parks and parking lots…Beggars harass you on the crowded trains of Mumbai, and they harass you on the less crowded trains of London. There is a difference in the degree of poverty, yes, but ultimately poverty anywhere, in any degree, is cruel, ugly and a reminder that we as a species still have a long way to go.

Of these two cities, and of some of the people who live and work here, more in my next post.